The world is full of pain and tragedy. In Syria, government forces continue their military operations against rebel strongholds, leading some prominent Americans to call for airstrikes. In North Korea, starvation remains a real and present danger for millions. In Mexico, there is genuine concern that fighting between rival drug cartels could cause the country to essentially collapse.

Closer to home, in Ottawa, there’s the woman who has a hard time fitting her car into her driveway. Plus, she’s a mother. Obviously a human rights issue.

The woman, Pamela Howson, has a tale of sorrow and woe that is hard to hear. She had asked Ottawa to allow her to build a parking pad on her front yard, but the city told her she’d need to apply to the minor variance committee. But she wasn’t having any of that, and who can blame her, given the ordeal she’s had to endure. She was practically forced to turn to the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario to address the city’s callous discrimination against her — it turns out that her car is 2.25 metres wide, but in order to get to her parking space behind her house, she has to pass through a driveway that’s only 2.6 metres wide. That’s a mere 6.7 inches of clearance per side. Can you even imagine such cruelty?

Hmm, actually, that doesn’t sound that bad, come to think of it. Pretty much like parking any car in any interior garage. It fact, exactly like driving into a garage. According to Home Depot (or at least based on their inventory), most of the garage doors they sell are a standard width of eight feet. Now let’s do a little quick math. Howson’s laneway is 2.6 metres wide at its narrowest point. One metre is 3.28 feet. That’s 2.6 x 3.28. And whaddya know? Her laneway is 8.5 feet across — wider than the typical garage door that people drive their cars through a bazillion times a day without incident, never realizing their human rights are being violated.

Howson claims that the city discriminated against her because it didn’t recognize her “family circumstances” two years ago, when she first asked about an exemption to park in front of her house. But the city is insisting that Howson never actually applied. When she asked the city if she could park in front of her house, the city told her to file an application with the committee of adjustment, but she didn’t bother doing that — and concedes as much, saying she felt it would be a waste of time. She skipped right from initial inquiry to claiming discrimination, without bothering to determine whether the city would actually grant her request. That’s rather like a “racialized person” walking into a business and asking if they’re hiring. Upon being told that yes, they are hiring, and they’d love to look at her resume, the “racialized person” lodges a discrimination suit because they weren’t instantly hired on the spot.

Also, the grounds of Howson’s complaint are questionable. By family circumstances, she means that she has three young children. But it’s not clear why that’s relevant. Unless she’s been strapping her kids to her car’s side mirrors, what bearing does the size of her family have on the width of her driveway? Howson claims she needs a wide car to accommodate three child seats, but the decision to buy the car was hers. That’s not the city’s fault. And the driveway is still wide enough, anyway!

To recap — we have a woman who claims that driving her car down a laneway that’s wider than the average garage opening is violating her human rights, because of her “family circumstances.” Why her family circumstances are the city’s problem are unclear. And she actually hasn’t been denied approval to park in front of her house. She never even bothered applying. That all sounds pretty weird, but there’s one last detail.

Howson is a former investigator for the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal — the people whose job it is to gather the facts that lets the Tribunal make their judgments. Anyone who has ever wondered about some of the more inane rulings made by that august body now has their explanation — if the bar for what constitutes discrimination is set this pathetically low, we’re all guilty of something.